More Books than Time

Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

The Bastard’s Refuge: Blood of Wrodor – Book One by Brian O’Rourke

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I’ve been cleaning out my Kindle library, reading some books that I’ve had for a couple of years, and came across The Bastard’s Refuge. I don’t recall exactly, but it was probably a BookBub special and I didn’t expect much, figured it would be yet another book that I read 10 pages of or so then delete. In fact The Bastard’s Refuge is excellent. Brian O’Rourke created a compelling world with tension, threats, intriguing back story and a far more interesting main character than many fantasy heroes.

Galeran lives at the Abbey of Bronze, a shelter for all high-born bastards, run by warrior monks. He is one day short of 18, and at 18 must either take monastic vows or leave. Noble families have a nasty habit of killing off bastards, either their own or their rivals, so leaving is risky, and it’s difficult since Galeran has no money and the abbey is remote. At the same time his country is under attack by invading Ra-Haizur, a force that includes over 100,000 warriors and skilled sorcerers.

One of those sorcerers is leading a force to capture the abbey and kill all the children and monks, thus eliminating all possible high-born children, even those born illegitimate. Galeran must take all the surviving children and escape to a forest.

And the book ends.

Yes, it ends. Galeran and a couple hundred kids are in a cavern making their way to safety when it ends. It speaks much for this author’s skill that I looked on Amazon to see the next book in the series, despite the horrible, cliffhanger ending. Unfortunately, although The Bastard’s Refuge is noted as Book One there does not seem to be a Book Two. If there were I would buy it.

4 Stars I’d give this a solid 5 stars for completely exceeding my (low) expectations and delivering a well-written fantasy had it not been for the ending.

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The Flaw in All Magic by Ben Dobson, Magebreakers Book 1 Even Mages are Human

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Even mages are human.  And humans make mistakes.  That was the thesis for Tane Carver’s senior dissertation at the mage school (which got him expelled in disgrace) and it is the underpinning for his livelihood.  The flaw in all magic is the mage who casts it.

Lead character Tane Carver is very, very good at analyzing magic and spotting flaws but has no magical ability.  Tane scratches a modest (very modest) living examining spell diagrams for flaws and advising how to correct problems and gaps in wards.

The Flaw in All Magic opens with the dean of divination at the mage school asking Tane to consult on a murder that could not have happened.  One of Tane’s old friends is murdered in a locked lab, secured behind wards that prevent anyone unauthorized to enter.  So how did someone gain access and who is the murderer?

The Flaw in All Magic combines a bit of whodunit with interesting fantasy elements and fun characters.  Tane is a bit much sometimes, way too smart and not always truthful.  Of course, as the hero, he bends the truth to save the day.  Tane is irksome when he gets on his soapbox and author Dobson is good enough writer to keep these soliloquies to a minimum.

Author Dobson did not stint on creating even minor characters with personality.  Indree, Tane’s old girlfriend and now a leading light in the local police, is fairly predictable yet believable, as are the nasty villain and the university leaders.

The best character is Kadka, half orc and half human, an extremely rare type of individual.  She left her orc homeland because they saw her as human, and wandered the human countries for a while, finding they saw her as Orc.  Now she is in Audland Protectorate, the one country left from the breakup of the Mage Empire centuries before that encourages magic and welcomes folks of all species, from goblins and orcs to elves and sprites.  Kadka is in love with magic, seeing the wonder in what the mages do and the beauty in the magical workings.

Kadka has a fairly simple philosophy; if threaten anyone I care about then I will smash your throat in.  That is extremely useful when she teams up with Tane to solve the murder and along the way finds a threat to her adopted country and indeed to everyone.  Kudos to Dobson for writing such a novel blend of innocence, wonder and badassery.

The Flaw in All Magic is an enjoyable read, well written with complex backstory, good pacing and solid characters. The writing is good, with a few clumsy moments, as when Tane explains to Kadka how things work to bring us readers into the backstory.

I’ll most likely look for the sequels.

3+ to 4 Stars

Sentinels: The Omega Superhero Book Three Series by Darius Brasher

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Sentinels, the third book about Theo Conley’s growth from out of shape country hick to high-powered super hero, takes a sharp bend from the first two novels.  Theo is a fully-licensed hero now, and finding his way in the big city and the wide world.  Things are different than he had expected with many more shades of gray and far less black and white.

Now he can discover just who killed his dad and why and bring them to justice yet Theo keeps hesitating.  He is slowly discovering that he can’t just jump in and blast the bad guys, that some bad guys take revenge against the wrong people, that judgement and wisdom are not the same things as strength and smarts.

The book has several unpleasant events, notably a very long and detailed evening in a strip club that I could have done without, an annoying “You are the Chosen One” sequence and a shocking end to a main character.  Further the ending is both shocking and unbelievable.  Theo found out who tried to kill him earlier but couldn’t go to the Hero’s Guild because he had no proof yet at the end he somehow has sufficient evidence.

Overall I did not like Sentinels nearly as much as I did Trials and Caped.  On the positive side Isaac remains a breath of fresh air and new character Taylor Lord is a great addition.  (Lord has has his own series too, what a coincidence, yes?)  On the negative side the story drags a bit due to uneven pacing and I do not care for The Chosen One theme nor the sexual content.

3 Stars

Trials: Omega Superhero Series Book 2 by Darius Brasher

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Darius Brasher’s Omega Superhero series started out well.  Caped introduces us to Theo and his friends and his world, one where meta humans can become licensed superheroes and fight bad guys, complete with cape, tights and mask.  I expected a fast plot with plenty of cliches and was happy to be surprised with a well-written novel peopled with characters and deepening stories.

Second novel, Trials, continues with Theo (aka Kinetic) taking the exhaustive and dangerous tests to earn his license.  Unfortunately for him someone is continuing their quest to kill him and isn’t too fussy about how they do it.  That murderous threat is one challenge; the others are from the nature of the trials themselves and the moral challenges of using one’s powers to help, not hurt, and friendship.

This series has been quite a find and I’m off to read the third book, Sentinels.

4 Stars

Caped: The Omega Superhero Book One – Contemporary Fantasy by Darius Brasher x

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Caped:  The Omega Superhero is surprisingly enjoyable.  Our hero, Theo, is dismayed to find he has the super powers, moreover, that he is an omega class, the most powerful.  Theo didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do in life – besides not be a farmer – but being a hero was definitely not his ideal career.

Events take over and Theo decides to embrace his abilities and learn as best he can to control them and take on the role of hero.  He is motivated first by revenge, but quickly discovers he has a new family with the other young heros-in-training.  Seeing Theo grow into a likable young man takes Caped from a typical adventure to a story with nuances of character, plot and back story plus a bit of humor to keep it lighthearted and a pleasant evening read.

Caped is the first in a series by author Darius Brasher and I intend to read Trials, the sequel.

4 Stars

Trust A Few: Haruspex Trilogy: Part One by E.M. Swift-Hook Space Opera

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Trust A Few: Haruspex Trilogy: Part One by E.M. Swift-Hook is a good book, with well-drawn characters, action and plenty of moral dilemmas.  So why did I keep leaving it to play a game on my tablet?  I’m not sure, but the story became less compelling about two thirds of the way through.  It may have been me or maybe it was the fact that all the characters enmeshed themselves in the criminal underworld – not appealing – or that the true villain in the story appeared only a few times.

We have four main characters with a few others adding conflicts and challenges.  Durban Chola sees Jaz as little more than a thug, a hard mercenary, a man who survived the worst military setting imaginable, but I see Jaz as the central character, the glue that holds everyone together.  Jaz would say Avilon is the keystone, and the action revolves around Avilon, but it is Jaz who has the most complex character and is the engine.  I kept hoping Jaz would find a way back to Vel’s cousin and her little girl, the two people he planned to make his permanent family until Durban yanked him away.

The setting is the underworld of an enormous city, in a world ruled by the Coalition and its CSF security forces.  We know from the beginning that the security force wants something from Avilon but we haven’t seen what it is yet.

In fact it isn’t at all clear why the group doesn’t just leave.  Jaz claims to be working on setting himself up to do just that, and Avilon will stay as long as Jaz, but it’s hard to believe they are both willing to kill people and do other evil just to build a stash.  Durban will stay close to Avilon, but Charity has little reason to do so.

Trust A Few is hard to rate.  I liked it enough to finish, but it did bog down for me and I’m not likely to seek out the sequels because I don’t care enough about any of the characters to see how they play out.

3 Stars

Shadowmage: Book Nine Of The Spellmonger Series – Great Fun by Terry Mancour

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Like all Mancour’s Spellmonger novels, Shadowmage: Book Nine Of The Spellmonger Series by Terry Mancour  is entertaining, engaging, lots of fun with a fast moving plot, complex villains and earnest heroes.  This time we join journeymen Tyndal and Rondal who decide to pursue their knightly quest to rid the world of the Rat Brotherhood thieves, extortionists, slavers, kidnappers, murderers, etc., etc., etc.  The Rats aren’t too keen on being done away with and are highly decentralized, making it difficult to do more than annoy them with any one assault.

Of course Tyndal and Rondal find a way, along with helping Alshar’s Orphan Duke Anguin, make lots of money and yes, kill a dragon.  The book ends with us once more reintroduced to the real villains in the Spellmonger’s world, the fanatical followers of Sheol and Korbol, the undead, necromantic folk who hate humans.

The two young knights are interesting characters who feel somewhat real – albeit a little too good to be true at surviving impossible odds – and we meet a couple new characters, noble sibling shadowmages Atopol and Gatina.  Gatina adds a sour note to the story.  She is 14 and looking for a husband.  Per her family’s rules she must find someone as perfect and as daring as possible and she settles on Rondal.  Rondal isn’t too sure he wants to be settled on and finds Gatina’s remorseless hunt a bit unsettling, but like most teenage boys he’s also not going to look too askew at a pretty girl.

Even allowing for the medieval backdrop of the story I found it jarring to read about a 14 year old seriously contemplating marriage.  Today we call someone like that jail bait and her father would have more than a warning!  I found her too obsessive to be real, plus far too good at sneaking around and stealing stuff and predict she will cause problems in the future for the Spellmonger gang, much like Isily.

Mancour creates an unusual world with plenty of magic, good guys and villains, political intrigue and interpersonal problems.  The world in Shadowmage was slightly less detailed and the action a little harder to follow.  Mancour includes maps but they are hard to read in the E format and I wasn’t able to ground myself in the territory.  His characters jump all over the place, which adds speed to their actions and to the plot – and avoids describing endless marches – and that jumping actually made it a little easier.  I just didn’t worry about where the different towns were.

I was wondering how well I’d recall the characters and plot of the prior novels because it’s been a couple of years.  It’s a tribute to Mancour’s vivid world and people that I had very little problem keeping people straight.  The novel runs in parallel with books seven and eight.

Spellmonger Minalan plays a small role in Shadowmage, which I missed.  He is by far my favorite character in the series, resourceful, smart, not overly greedy or too ambitious and wary as heck of the Castalan spy queen!  I hope he has a larger part in book 10.

Overall the story is very good.  The medieval-style drawings of cats and rats and nobles and dragons are charming and add a piquant note.  I enlarged each one to take a good look.  Unfortunately the copy editor needs to learn something about homonyms, spelling, grammar, copy/pasting.  The Amazon credits mention the editor, but all I can say is the book must have been a muddy mess originally if it is still this bad after editing.  Some of the other Spellmonger novels are so poorly edited they are hard to follow; Shadowmage is not that bad although a few places we readers have to assume the author simply forgot words “not” or “no”.

Shadowmage was one of the 500+ books I lost (along with the first eight Spellmonger novels) when I sold my business.  I was glad to use my Kindle Unlimited account to borrow instead of buy this time.

4 Stars

The Battersea Barricades – Chronicles of St. Mary’s by Jodi Taylor Short Story

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Mrs. Mack, Mrs. Enderby, and Mrs. Shaw are all minor characters in the mainline St. Mary’s book, and here they tell the story that we roughly know from The Very First Damned Thing.  The Battersea Barricades starts with Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Shaw describing how they wanted to get involved with an low-key rebellion, “where they threw the Fascists out of Cardiff” and met Mrs. Mack.  They jump right into the story without giving a lot of rationale for why the Fascists were in power in the first place – they describe it as more creeping Fascism that seems innocuous at first, then later shows its ugly head.

Overall this is a decent short story if you care about the characters, but it is far outside the mainstream St. Mary’s novel.  There is no time jump, no Mr. Markham, no Chief Ferrel, no Tim Peterson.  The narrative is somewhat jumbled, as fits the characters’ feelings and actions at the time, but we don’t see an overview as to the rest of England.

The ending was weird and felt pushed together.  Mrs. Mack, Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Shaw stopped the slow-motion civil war by jumping on a crashed bus and standing with the Union Jack in front of a very menacing gun helicopter.  It reminds me of the Tienanmen Square picture with the one man facing down a line of tanks.  We always salute the courage of the man who faced the tanks, but we need to remember there are two heroes in that picture – with the second one being the man commanding that first tank.  It took moral courage for him to stand down, to say no.  And just the same way it takes courage for the helicopter pilot to back off.

Now in the ending the helicopter comes back without guns – same pilot?  who knows? and salutes the ladies.  Very nice but not very satisfying.  It felt as if Jodi Taylor needed to bring the story to a graceful end so she used that method.

The ladies were young in The Battersea Barricades and show determination and grit, but not the skill and ability to navigate through the St. Mary’s world that we see them display in all the books, especially A Trail Through Time, an Argumentation of Historians.  It is as if Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Shaw are playing Max’s role, that of the serious disaster magnet.  It doesn’t quite work.

I’m giving this 4 stars; I’ll re-read it (as I do every St. Mary’s book, multiple times) but it just isn’t quite the same caliber as the rest of the short stories or novels in the series.

The Steam Pump Jump – Chronicles of St. Mary’s by Jodi Taylor Short Featuring Markham and Romance

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Last we visited St. Mary’s, grieving Dr. Peterson had his head and heart brutally ripped by by treachery.  Miss Dottle, who despite her crush on Tim Peterson, proved herself red-handed in league with Clive Ronan, responsible for spying on Max, that led Helen’s murder and Max and Matthew’s abductions.  Poor Tim.  He is heartbroken, barely functioning on autopilot.

Max has a wonderful idea to give him someone new, possibly leading to romance, possibly only to friendship.  Max recruits Markham to somehow shove Peterson and Miss Lingoss together while on their next jump, back to 1600s and the first steam pump in a castle, before Cromwell’s revolution.  What could possibly go wrong?

Of course Miss Sykes and Miss North come too – and get into a fierce argument in public and in the past – and Markham needs to sort them out, give Peterson and Lingoss time to talk, and yes, eat the entire picnic meant for six.

Once more we have the incredibly fun, zany adventures of the St. Mary’s gang, this time with Markham the central character and narrator.  Markham likes to pretend he’s stoic, unaffected by much, but we see the truth.  He cares deeply about Max, Tim, Leon (and Hunter), and is glad to take on Max’s subversive assignment.

Jodi Taylor creates such characters, alive, vivid, fascinating, full and completely human.  Add in a fun plot, good dialogue and the usual historical nuggets (that cause me to visit Wikipedia more than a few times) and we have another winner in this St. Mary’s short story.

You should not try to read The Steam Pump Jump without being somewhat familiar with the St. Mary’s crew and events so far.  At a minimum it would help to have read And the Rest Is History and  An Argumentation of Historians, Books 8 and 9 in the series.  Both books are excellent although more serious and a bit darker than the rest of the series.  The Steam Pump Jump brings us readers back to lighthearted fun and is a worthy addition to the series and the lore of St. Mary’s.

5 Stars

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Kill the Farm Boy by Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson; Unsuccessful Parody with Puns

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I had such high hope for Kill the Farm Boy by Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson.  Hearne wrote the Iron Druid fantasy series and the recent A Plague of Giants (reviewed here) and this new novel is promoted as a “hilarious sendup of Chosen One narratives” full of “puns, flipped tropes”, cheese and a sassy goat.  Sounds like it’s going to be super funny good, or else really really bad.  Sadly it’s not good.

The novel starts out with a map full of strange place names – Retchedde, Sullenne, Muffincrumb and Gobbleneck – which got me interested right away.  I love fantasy books that need maps.  The map was the best part.  The pixie with one blue sock shoots her arrow of Chosen-Oneness to our supposed hero, the Farm Boy.  Farm Boy decides he needs to rescue the princess in her rose brier infested castle, and Gus, the talking goat, decides to come too.  So far it’s a bit stupid, but OK.

The novel follows the traditional quest narrative, where the fearless band of strangers coalesces into a group of friends, all working together to, to, to what?  Don’t know.  A couple of the band go to the witch to find a cure for the now-dead Farm Boy, the evil wizard visits the witch to steal her magic, the goat just wants to avoid the curry pot and the hunts lady is going because why not.

Evil wizard can make bread; his hunts lady is a prime klutz; the bard looks more like a rabbit than a girl and the warrior maiden doesn’t much like wearing chain mail bikinis.  These types of silly points need a light touch to make them funny and keep the book rolling along, but the authors keep beating the same points over and over.  How many jokes about cold chain mail bikinis can you listen to?  And how many times can you read about the talking goat and his pellets?  Or the budding romance between warrior maiden and rabbit-maiden-bard?  Or the incredibly clumsy and not real smart hunts lady?

The whole novel is like this.  A couple of the merry band die and the rest just keep going; in fact after the first one dies from poison mislabeled there isn’t even a pause.  He dies, they go.  The problem is that if you are parodying a quest then there must be some actual quest elements.

Kill the Farm Boy was obnoxious with stupid innuendo and jokes that appeal to 13 year old boys.  The parody didn’t work well because everything was a parody; the quest was no quest, the wizard is no wizard, the evil witch is not evil, the nastiness in the mines of Moiria (oh sorry, the Catacombs of Yore) is all illusion.

Kill the Farm Boy tries to be funny but it’s too pretentious and too asinine to make it work.

2 Stars

I received this for free in expectation of an honest review.